Influence of resin flow on shrinkage of additive manufacturing coated sand molds

Coated sands are used extensively for additive manufacturing sand molds in the metal casting process, and the packing structure changes caused by the resin flow promote the shrinkage and deformation of the part. During the coated sand heating, the resin on the surface flowing to the contact points of the particles forms the resin neck and causes particles to pack close to each other. In this work, the diameters of the coated ceramsite sand before and after heating were measured based on in-situ experimental observations with image measuring apparatus and blue laser, to obtain the relationship between resin coating thickness and the particle diameter. The particle packing model was established to describe the particles’ achievement of a stable state one by one. A re-packing simulation was then performed after reducing the particle diameter according to the resin coating thickness, to obtain the shrinkage ratios at different particle size distributions. It was found that the resin coating thickness increased from 0.8 to 2.3 μm as the particle diameter increased from 107 to 500 μm, for the coated ceramsite sand with the resin content of 2wt.%; the shrinkage ratio decreased first and then increased as the particle diameter increased. The experimental minimum shrinkage ratio was 3.28%, and the corresponding particle diameter was 300–375 μm, while the minimum shrinkage ratio obtained by simulation was 3.43%, and the corresponding particle diameter was 214–300 μm. After mixing the five groups proportionally, the shrinkage ratios of the simulation and experiment dropped to 2.81% and 3.04%, respectively, indicating the best results.